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Photo by: Gatis Orlickis

From September 29th to October 3rd 2025, our team was represented at the Big Data from Space 2025 conference (BiDS) organised by the European space Agency (ESA). We had several presentations and presence at an expo area where we showcased our European Research Council (ERC) research project WaterSmartLand using open-source tools.

📌 Alexander Kmoch, Associate Professor in Geoinformatics, made a presentation in the session “Towards Digital Twins: Integrating Data, Models, and Insight” on the topic of “OGC DGGS & Zarr: Building Blocks for Big Data Digital Twins”. In the presentation he demonstrated a novel architecture that combines DGGS with cloud-native Zarr storage to create universal building blocks for EO data management.

In June 2025, our team was represented at Europe’s largest remote sensing conference – the ESA Living Planet Symposium in Vienna and shared our latest advancements in Earth Observation!

As a major step forward in data management and analysis we presented the first version of the data cube.

Presentations were made on following topics:

• “Developing a Data Cube for Biodiversity and Carbon Dynamics Assessment in Estonia with Remote Sensing data” by Oleksandr Borysenko, Jan Pisek, Mirjam Uusõue, Alexander Kmoch, Holger Virro, Wai Tik Chan, Eveli Sisas, Ats Remmelg, Marta Jemeljanova, and Evelyn Uuemaa 🌿📊

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Our team members Evelyn Uuemaa, Alexander Kmoch and Merli Neito participated at the 28th AGILE conference in Dresden, Germany from 10 to 13 June.

Four days of conference introduced us to some exciting research going on in geoinformatics and we were also honoured to contribute to the programme with various appearances:

📌 Evelyn Uuemaa carried out a workshop on the topic of Geospatial Data Management, sharing challenges and good practices with the participants.

We participated at EGU2025 in Vienna from 28th of April to 2nd of May 2025 and shared findings from our last year’s research. We’ve got a diverse lineup of presentations covering a range of topics:

Marta Jemeljanova: “Nutrient concentration modelling in the Baltic countries using spatial machine learning”

Alexander Kmoch: “Spatial autocorrelation in machine learning for modelling soil organic carbon”

Kayziel Martinez: “Navigating New Grids: Evaluating DGGS Configurations for Marine Spatial Analysis”

In the middle of January 2025, Marta Jemeljanova, Alexander Kmoch and Evelyn Uuemaa visited the GIST Lab at Aalto University, led by Henrikki Tenkanen and the Geoinformatics Department at the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute (FGI) , led by Juha Oksanen.

We explored exciting opportunities for collaboration, particularly between the Digital Waters Flagship project and ERC WaterSmartLand.

In addition, we shared our experiences in teaching FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial), further strengthening our commitment to open science, digital enablement, and knowledge exchange.

On Tuesday, 17 Dec 2024, our researcher Alexander Kmoch visited the ESA headquarters in Paris, where he met with science and technology staff to discuss DGGS in general. ESA is evaluating how to move forward with DGGS, and Alexander was invited to share his knowledge as well.

The participants had a lively exchange of opinions and technical details.